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Our Investment in LeadPages

We’re excited to announce today our investment in LeadPages. Based in Minneapolis, Minnesota (our first MN investment!), LeadPages is the easiest way to create and split-test landing pages, launch pages, sales pages, webinar registration pages, and other conversion pages.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the web for generating customer leads. With hundreds of thousands of businesses competing for the attention of consumers across the web, the importance of web marketing continues to increase. There are numerous ways that companies drive traffic to their websites, and a large industry has evolved around the best marketing practices to drive that traffic through better content and marketing strategies and effective use of ad spending on things such as Google AdWords. However much less attention has been paid to the pages where those ads drive customers, and what they’re asked to do once they land on those pages.

LeadPages was developed to address this problem by enabling publishers to quickly and easily create effective landing pages that better capture customer information and convert website visitors into potential customers. To accomplish this, LeadPages has a library of customizable landing pages designed for a variety of customer interaction types – from signing up for a webinar, downloading a free whitepaper, to simply capturing names and contact information. Like anything related to online advertising, there is a massive amount of expertise involved in creating an effective landing page. Best practices not only change by industry but also by geography, target demographic, and a host of other factors. And because preferences change over time as people become exposed (and over-exposed) to today’s designs, these best practices are constantly changing. Because LeadPages captures data on every interaction across their network of pages (LeadPages generally hosts customer pages on their own network), they are in a unique position to help their customers make data-driven decisions on the best landing page for their specific purpose and to allow them to continue to optimize for traffic conversion over time.

In addition to the easy creation of landing pages, LeadPages also allows their customers the ability to push customer information generated through LeadPages to a number of different platforms – for example CRM systems and email marketing platforms. This functionality is quite powerful to marketers, who generally have to manually enter information into various systems, or deploy engineering resources to automate the data integration between systems.

Ultimately, LeadPages’ aspiration is to power better marketing across the web. We’re excited to have Clay, Tracy, Simon and the entire LeadPages team join the Foundry family in pursuit of this goal.

Fantastic news Clay, the LP/LB team, and the Foundry Group. LeadPages is indeed a fantastic marketing service and continues to innovate the world of optimized lead generation and conversions. Looking forward to the next phase of growth!

Those guys did a real nice job with the intro video – got this blog update >> clicked through >> watched on bus on way to work >> likely to sign up. Doesn’t look like it has sf.com or marketo integration, unless I”m missing something. Nice to see a VC firm so consistently promote its portfolio co’s effectively. BTW- would be interested to hear Foundry Group’s take on domains. When I got to work, went to leadpages.com, didn’t realize that’s a diff company. Between .net and .io you think .net is better? What do you advise in situations where the .com domain is taken (choose diff brand name on basis of domain availability, or just chose alt domain?). I infer you don’t view that as a big deal these days, but if people tell their buddy (word of mouth) about LeadPages and the first thing they do is go to Leadpages.com (which is also related to email marketing) …

P.S. obviously LeadPages has ridiculous site traffic / success. And anyone that is sufficiently interested is going to figure it out the .net part. But I repeatedly hear this domain name scarcity issue come up for other founder types and there never seems to be any coherent dialogue about .net vs. .io vs. other options, when the .com is already claimed (and whether the .com still carries the degree of importance it once did … and when it makes sense to try to buy out some clown squatting on a .com). It’s startup branding minutia, but interesting …

Thanks for the thoughts, @TravisVan09:disqus. Great point about the .com … we’ve been trying for a long time to get ahold of the owner of LeadPages.com. We’re either going to have to re-brand or buy that at some point.

Also, we don’t currently integrate with SF.com or Marketo, but will likely do so soon. Our early adopters are very small business owners that largely aren’t using SF or Marketo. But the average size of our client is growing, and we’re seeing more demands for these integrations.

That’s awesome that you guys are getting demands for specific integrations – a very positive sign of traction. I’d argue that there are a lot of small co’s that use Salesforce.com for the workflow api access (and overpay), as my company does. Probably less so w/ Marketo, which is super expensive and seems to be pretty exclusive to larger budgets (though they may argue to the contrary).

Hector Torres

Hey Clay, Congrats on this great accomplishment. I just learned about LeadPages this week after watching a Webinar by Amy Porterfield. I initially went to the .com address and thought I had typed the name wrong. Then I realized you had a .net address. So I would agree that getting that .com in the future would be a good investment, assuming the owner does not try to charge you an arm and a leg. I have a similar problem where I ownhttp://wp-monitor.com (a WordPress monitoring and maintenance service) and am trying to locate the owner of wpmonitor.com (without the dash) to buy that name/

As for LeadPages itself, it looks like an awesome product and we’ll definitely be purchasing a license in the coming week and checking it out. Good luck to you and your company!!

bvantil

Excellent investment in an excellent product. I bought LeadPages (annual) awhile back without any specific need as the product philosophy and execution are just spot on (and being Dutch, I wanted the ‘early adopter’ pricing :). One example; the UI overhaul that magically appeared one day…and then Clay’s email a day or two later (“we’re working on” vs “what do you think about the new ___” are very different things) Clay’s one of the most passionate (and smart) founders I’ve seen. Makes perfect sense that Feld & Co. 😉 see that and are betting on both horse and jockey. Congrats to all.

Michael Nelson

There is no better set of tools for landing pages than those created by LeadPages and I feel as if I must have tried them all! I can’t wait to see how this funding helps raise the bar even further!

Chris Daigle

Congrats to all involved!

Chris

I signed up to use Leadpages a few days ago and I’m having all kinds of trouble because it doesn’t do as claimed (i.e. send collected emails to my email program despite demonstration videos that show it doing just this) and I can’t find ANY support, I’ve now wasted 2 work days trying to get some solutions/workarounds. My email service provider has a service team and they have been excellent but unfortunately they say the problem lies with Leadpages. LeadPages appear to offer support for an additional fee. Frankly this experience has given me no confidence in their ability to provide service once I’ve coughed up more money. The only customer service appears to be self help through a knowlegebase. I would have thought that a company trying to get and keep customers would at least make sure that new customers got their software to perform as advertised before they pass them off to a self help knowlegebase. Perhaps you guys can put me in contact with someone at Leadpages who is interested in fixing this problem?

Support is free for customers and we have an excellent support team that will stop at nothing to help you.

Warm regards,
Clay

leadpagereviewer

I’ve tested all the lead page builders out there including this one. None are user friendly or easy to use. Im not easily discouraged since
I love to see how systems work but I have been disappointed by them all . Imagine an average user trying to build a page for his business